In nearly all transformations of syllabics, deletion
disturbs the stanzas into free verse. That process is physically evident in
typescripts of "To a Snail" and "A Grave."

. . .

A pivotal typescript/manuscript of " A Grave" also shows the close
relationship between excision and free verse (Rosenbach I:02:14). The key
syllabic draft, itself a revision, begins the same way the final draft does—"Man
looking into the sea." Four types of marks are handwritten on the
typescript: deletions, alternative wordings in the margins, five slash marks in
the first two stanzas, and an editorial comment—"All redundant." The
next draft, on another page, excludes material deleted on the previous
typescript, for example, "each with an emerald turkey foot at the
top"; it replaces excised material with revisions pencilled in the margin
of the previous typescript, for example, "their contemporaries row across
them"; and it divides the poem as free verse, following the slash marks in
the first two stanzas. The remarked-on redundancy triggers the change to free
verse.

Although free verse line divisions are conveniently associated with deletions
on this typescript, other factors may also have influenced the revision of
"A Grave." The deletions are not as numerous as is typical with
Moore's other free verse transformations, two deletions totalling 29 syllables
out of a 333- syllable draft, and one of those deletions is replaced with
alternative lines. Yet the one real deletion, "each with an emerald turkey
foot at the top," is in the middle of the cluster of five slash marks which
indicate all the divisions of lines 3 through 8 in the next draft, the first
free verse version. It is ironic that this deleted material, apparently so
crucial in the transformation of the poem, reappears in subsequent drafts, but
by that time "A Grave" was settled in its free verse format.

Also, as Holley has suggested (83), line length may be especially important
in "A Grave," which has three 32-syllable lines in the first syllabic
draft. In the crucial second syllabic draft, Moore divides up the 32-syllable
lines, creating another regular syllabic pattern with shorter lines. The slash
marks on that draft may indicate other syllabic alternatives considered while
Moore reworked the line lengths. Unsettled line length may be as significant as
displacement by deletion in this poem. However, when Moore breaks up the
32-syllable lines, she produces another syllabic draft with an alternative
regularity. The slash marks in that second draft, clustered around the only
simple deletion marked on that crucial typescript, point to the deletion as the
key element breaking up the form.

from "Marianne Moore's Concentrated Free Verse: 'Starve it Down and
Make it Run.'" SAGETRIEB 10.3

Jeanne Heuving

In "A Grave," Moore begins with a meditation on the
impossibility of seeing the sea, when a "Man looking into the sea" takes
"the view from those who have as much right to it as you have to it yourself."
Moore calls attention to two difficulties here: the problem of seeing "through"
a man, including a man's viewpoint, and the related problem of establishing herself as a
centered speaker when she cannot stand "in the middle of this." Moore's
depiction of the sea, correspondingly emphasizes its opacity over its translucency and its
surface activities over its symbolic meanings. While Moore may well have written this poem
out of a personal crisis that involved thoughts of suicide, the speaker reminds herself
that to seek relief in the sea is not to be mirrored in any improved way or to be freed of
herself. The speaker works her way out of her crisis by establishing and confronting the
actuality or literality of the sea and of death, and her difference from them.

The form of "A Grave" bears an inverse relation to the poetic genre described
by M.H. Abrams as the greater Romantic lyric. In the greater Romantic lyric, a speaker
resolves his initial sense of crisis through meditation on a natural scene. Typically the
speakers initial mood of unhappiness or dejection is transformed through an aspect
of change in the scene itself--sudden winds, for example, or a clearing sky. Through his
meditation, the speaker "achieves an insight, faces up to a tragic loss, comes to a
moral decision, or resolves an emotional problem." For Abrams, then, the typical
pattern of this kind of lyric is out-in-out; that is, the speakers attention is first
focused outside of himself, then turns inward, and then returns to the world around him.
The speaker, in fact, may be seen to possess a highly specular relation to the outer
scene, projecting his problems onto it and eventually finding in it a happier reflection.

Moore's "A Grave" reverses this pattern. This poem begins and ends with a
short meditation, positing a lengthy scenic description in the middle of the poem.
Further, it is precisely through the speakers separation from the natural scene,
which in dominant Romantic iconography is feminine, that she achieves a positive
resolution of her crisis. In Moore's poem, the sea prohibits the self-projection and
identification prominent in (male) Romantic poems, for it is "quick to return a
rapacious look." The sea's "look" is very different from the viewers
gaze, for her "look" can be destroyed:

There are others beside you who have worn that look
whose expression is no longer a protest; the fish no longer
investigate them
for their bones have not lasted:

Whether Moore is alluding to her own thoughts about suicide, or to those of others, she
repudiates suicide as a meaningful action. The sea is not a mirroring surface, but an
actual grave. Consequently, it is man's surface activity--his particular and careful
acts--and not his self -projections, which ultimately save him. Whereas men "lowering
nets" unconsciously "desecrate this grave," "as if there were no such
thing as death," the speaker of this poem, conscious of the ultimate meaning of
penetrating the depths of the sea, trains her vision to the surface:

The wrinkles progress among themjselves in a phalanx
beautiful under networks of foam,
and fade breathlessly while the sea rustels in and out of the
seaweed;
the birds swin through the air at top speed, emitting cat-calss
as heretofore
the tortoise-shell scourges about the feet of the cliffs, in
motion beneath them

As do greater Romantic lyrics, Moore's poem becomes more intense near the end. But,
unlike these lyrics, the intensity causes the speaker to become more conscious of her
meditation on the outer scene, as the sound of birds and bell-buoys make
"noises" in what has previously been an almost entirely visual representation.
The poem resolves its initial questions about perspective and of seeing the sea with an
understanding of the opacity of the ocean and what the ocean is not:

and the ocean, under the pulsation of lighthouse and noise of
bell buoys,
advances as usual, looking as if it were not that ocean in
which dropped things are bound to sink
in which if they turn and twist, it is neither with volition nor
consciousness.

The tone of the ending is intriguing, sounding both of victory and defeat. But it is
precisely because of its irresolute and provisional perspective, a perspective that does
not claim too much in the face of death, that the poem can reach closure. Importantly, the
poem concludes with "consciousness," not "volition," for it is the
speakers unswerving awareness of the sea as a grave and not her will to power over
it that allows her to resolve her crisis. Although Pound suggested that Moore invert the
order of consciousness and volition to create a stronger ending, Moore elected to keep the
order of her words as written. Unwilling to sentimentalize her own personal powers by
urging a notion of will in the face of death, the speaker, and presumably Moore,
establishes her strength ultimately through her circumspect consciousness of this grave.

The overall effect of this poem is of a kind of containment, as if everything could be
known only through its most pronounced boundedness. As a woman, Moores speaker is
traditionally associated with the natural scene and with death itself; Moore resolves her
speakers crisis by establishing the literalness of the sea and death, as entities
entirely apart from and different than herself.

"Man looking into the sea" begins Marianne Moore's first published version of
"A Grave" ("Graveyard," The Dial, July, 1921). This version and
another, earlier version which was resurrected and printed by Ezra Pound in Milan in 1932,
are both revisions of Moore's unpublished "A Graveyard in the Middle of the
Sea," produced between September 1916 and September 1918; and the Dial poem
itself was slightly revised before appearing in final form in her 1924 book, Observations.
All versions are obsessed with looking and the return of a look, with seeing and seeing
again. The pun on sea itself, activated in the opening phrase--"Man looking
into the sea"--is one compressed example of the way we are ourselves made to re-view
words and concepts as we read this poem. "A Grave," then, with its preoccupation
with viewing and re-viewing and its challenging opening address to "Man" has
seemed to me a compelling example of a modern woman writer's re-vision. Moore here is not
only a meticulous observer of the natural seascape, but also a critical observer of and
wily respondent to the male-dominated poetic tradition.

Along with other admirers of Moore's work such as Bonnie Costello and Alicia Ostriker,
I believe that her poetry, traditionally "feminine" in many of its strategies,
is far more cannily subversive of inherited values than either early, and predominantly
male, criticism or most of the more recent feminist criticism has acknowledged. Male
critics have tended to write of Moore in a manner which displays affection, even genuine
admiration, tinged with condescension. One thinks, for example, of T. S. Eliot's 1923
pronouncement: "And there is one final, magnificent' compliment: Miss Moore's
poetry is as 'feminine' as Christina Rossetti's, one never forgets that it is written by a
woman; but with both one never thinks of this as anything but a positive virtue [my
emphasis]" (51). (One enjoys imagining Eliot's response to a similarly telling
"but" in a high-handed sentence comparing his poetry to Donne's--both there
judged as markedly, but surprisingly tolerably, "masculine.") Then there are (as
just a small selection) Gorham Munson's Marianne Moore, a "minor poet" of
"idiosyncratic behavior" (92); John Unterecker's "Mistress of quirks and
oddities" (v); and Roy Harvey Pearce's "lady-like" poet, possessed of a
"fussy modesty" (366). We can perhaps guess what these critics are responding to
in Moore's work, but their tone is paternalistically dismissive. Their Marianne Moore
seems a bizarre, oxymoronic figure, somehow significantly trivial--a sort of Munchkin
Queen of poetry. They seem to be discussing a body of work which they do not, at bottom,
take seriously.

Eagerly one turns to feminist critics for an alternate, and more regardful, view, only
to encounter the timid, "limited" and "spinsterly" Marianne Moore of
Suzanne Juhasz's criticism (33-56), the "maidenly" and "discreet"
Moore of Adrienne Rich's (39). There is understandable urgency behind these
dissatisfactions: those who are looking for a model of unabashed autobiographical
revelation, for a call to political action, or for unambiguous passion and anger will not
find them in this poet's work. But Marianne Moore has (as one might expect of such a
resolutely individual and productive writer) another, bolder side. Beneath surface polish
and politesse, she is also radical and revisionary. In "A Grave," we see both
the reactionary and the revolutionary at work--and returning to the history of this early
Modernist poet attentive to the poet's persistently double nature, we can retrieve some of
what Alicia Ostriker has called Moore's "challenge to traditional authority and the
beauty of [her] alternative vision" (3).

Imagine a well-educated American woman sitting down early in this century to write a
poem about the sea. Naturally, she is not unaware of a European tradition of poetry on
this subject stretching back to Homer; naturally, she wishes to make her own contribution,
to write a poem distinguished from all that has come before. She sits down and puts pen to
paper (or fingers to keys) and composes the following six-line stanza:

The cypresses of experience dead, yet indestructible by circumstance;
shivering and stony in the water; not green
But white, surrounding all that is loathsome:
inanimate
Scavengers guarding permanent garbage: watched over by sharks
which cruise between
Them--petrine like death yet so petrine as patient;
everything everywhere
Yet nothing, because nowhere; infinity defined at last, still
infinity because there
Where nothing is.

Now imagine a student facing this turbid extended sentence fragment on her M.A.
comprehensive exam: what is going on in this passage, and to whom would you attribute it?
The unlucky student would, I think, be hard put to say. She might associate the hypotaxis,
terms of negation, and strange stanzaic shape with Moore. The lines, she might notice,
assertively too long for a standard page, are tucked as often happens with Moore's poems.
Given only this stanza--one of four in the earliest extant draft--she could only guess
that it is, in fact, oddly shaped because characteristically syllabic (the unlikely count
per line being 32, 14, 19, 19, 23, and 4). The verse displays Moore's enduringly nervous
relation to rhyme (two true rhymes, an unrhymed second line, and a sibilant last line
which, unknown to the student, is delicately echoed by a final, hissing half-rhyme in each
subsequent stanza). But (and here a wrench is thrown into our hypothetical student's
Moore-works) the poet preserves the traditional capitalization at line beginnings. And (as
far more serious disqualifications) what an uncharacteristic collocation of abstractions,
what un-Mooreish stasis and morbidity. Here we leave the bemused student at her desk and
return to Marianne Moore at hers.

Confronted with her self-assigned task, Moore has written lines peculiarly enervated
and enervating. They suggest not only immobility in the marine setting, but also a poet
nearly immobilized by inherited notions. The writer's mind, one might almost say, is a
Sargasso Sea. We would be wrong to exclaim "there is nothing! In the whole and
all,/Nothing that's quite your own"--but rather than consciously deploying reference
and quotation as in so many of her poems, Moore here seems quite uncharacteristically
freighted with received ideas.

Laurence Stapleton observes that this first version of "A Gravel," entitled
"A Graveyard in the Middle of the Sea," is "clearly indebted to Poe's
City in the Sea" (20). That poem, famous (or infamous) for the line,
"the viol, the violet, and the vine," overindulges in morbidity the way some
people over indulge in chocolate:

Lo! Death has reared himself a throne
In a strange city lying alone
Far down within the dim West
Where the good and the bad and the worst and the best
Have gone to their eternal rest.
There shrines and palaces and towers
(Time-eaten towers that tremble not!)
Resemble nothing that is ours.
. . . . .
There open fanes and gaping graves
Yawn level with the luminous waves!

Now this verse clearly resembles nothing that is Moore's. Yet we do hear in her stanza
uncharacteristically heavy alliteration ( "guarding permanent garbage,"
"not so petrine as patient"); we register some variety of atmospheric
moroseness. These are, as she sits down to write, part of the tug backwards, part of her
cargo. So are Matthew Arnold and his most famous sea poem. Writing out of the first World
War in which her Presbyterian minister brother served as a chaplain in the navy, Moore
might well recall Arnold's "ignorant armies" and his mournful response; see to a
withdrawing "Sea of Faith." Here she labors under the self-conscious burden of
an Arnoldian "serious subject" and cultural critique, taking pains to portray a
sea full of "loathsome" refuse and amoral scavengers. In another poem obsessed
with decay--moral and physical--and with the sea, a contemporary of Moore's envisions his
persona as a scavenger, "a pair of ragged claws/scuttling across the floors of silent
seas." There is no way of knowing whether Moore had read "The Love Song of J.
Alfred Prufrock" (first published in 1917) before drafting her stanza--but, written
at the same moment in literary history, her lines convey a similar sense of physical
revulsion and even exhibit verbal "visions and revisions" in the form of an
Eliotic stutter ("petrine"/"petrine,"
"infinity"/"infinity," "nothing"/"nothing").

My point here is not that Marianne Moore was slavishly imitating these particular poets
nor, of course, that literary influences are necessarily debilitating, but that in this
first stanza an agglomeration of post-Romantic male voices is entrammeling rather than
enabling. Moore jettisoned the freight and began again with what had been originally her
second stanza:

Man looking into the sea, taking the view from those
who have as much
right to it as you have to it yourself, it is human na-
ture to stand in the middle of a thing....

She then sent the new version called "The Graveyard" (which I am assuming is
essentially the same as the poem resurrected and printed in Milan in 1932) to Ezra Pound,
the man who stood in the middle of the Modernist movement in poetry.

Pound's answer of December 16, 1918, and Moore's prompt reply are chiefly interesting
for their implications about these writers' relations to literary authority. Pound, of
course, simply assumes it. Moore displays some of that female anxiety about it which
Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar discuss--but she also displays remarkable independence and
self-assurance. Obviously impressed and fascinated by her work, Pound compliments Moore
("your stuff holds my eye") and expresses thankfulness (or an unconscious
competitive wish) for her eschewal of poetic volubility:

Thank God, I think you can be trusted not to pour out a flood (in the manner of dear
Amy and poor old Masters) (143).

Moore responds reassuringly, with a statement which--to borrow her own characteristic
double negative--we might now see as not altogether un-false:

I grow less and less desirous of being published, produce less and have a strong
feeling for letting alone what little I produce. (Tomlinson 12)

Pound authoritatively suggests the omission of conventional capitalization, and Moore,
seeing his point ("To capitalize the first word of every line, is rather
slavish") substitutes small letters. But when, finding her syllabic measure
attractive, Pound appropriately inquires "whether my beginnings had anything to do
with yr. metric," Moore refuses the role of favorite female student: "The
resemblance of my progress to your beginnings is an accident so far as I can see."
And when he proposes inverting the order of the last words in her poem from "neither
with volition nor consciousness" to "neither with consciousness nor volition,
" she politely replies, "I am willing to make the change, though I prefer the
original order"--but privately sticks to her guns, maintaining original order in both
the Dial revision and later in Observations. Moore's use of the nouns
"volition" and "consciousness" and her decision about their
arrangement suggest, as I hope to show, a great deal about her re-vision of the sea as an
image and of Romanticism as a literary influence.

In Women Writers and Poetic Identity, Margaret Homans has delineated the
particular problematics of the Romantic literary inheritance for women readers and
writers:

In Romantic poetry the self and the imagination are primary. During and after the
Romantic period it was difficult for women who aspired to become poets to share in this
tradition, not for constitutional reasons but for reasons that women readers found within
the literature itself. Where the masculine self dominates and internalizes otherness, that
other is frequently defined as feminine, whether she is nature, the representation of a
human woman, or some phantom of desire. To be for so long the other and the object made it
difficult for nineteenth-century women [and, as Homans also suggests, for
twentieth-century women as well] to have their own subjectivity. (12)

According to Homans' formulation, woman is the silent "other" of
male-dominated Romantic poetry. Subject to male authority, she becomes dissociated from
her own subjectivity. As Rodolfo says of Mimi (who loves him for it), and as William
"oft" suggests in another genre and language about his adored and adoring sister
Dorothy, "Son un poeta, ma essa poesia." Mimi lies still and pale, quietly dying
of consumption while Rodolfo sings the famous final bars of La Bohéme. Dorothy
Wordsworth's beautiful and self-effacing private journals will always and understandably
be dusted off and checked out of the library by the occasional reader, while her brother's
poems circulate in multiple editions. Well-versed in the verses of singing men who seem to
love her best when she is silent (or unpublished), or dead, how does the aspiring female
writer come to terms with her inheritance? How does she distinguish herself from beautiful
but mute Nature and so avoid the fate of Lucy, memorialized in William Wordsworth's
simultaneously consoling and terrifying elegy?

No motion has she now, no force;
She neither hears nor sees;
Rolled round in earth's diurnal course,
With rocks, and stones, and trees.

In the final version of "A Grave," Marianne Moore adapts the terms--the
dominant figures or tropes--of her Romantic inheritance in order to come to terms with it,
quite literally "coming to terms" by arriving at her own powerful poetic
language. Keeping in mind the admittedly simplified but nevertheless useful description of
Romanticism that I have plucked from Homans' text, we can see Moore's completed poem as
both a continuation of that tradition and a devastating commentary upon it. Wordsworth, as
we have seen, emphasizes the dead Lucy's lack of volition ("No motion has she now, no
force") and of consciousness ("She neither hears nor sees"). This double
lack is, as Homans suggests, the horrible but ideal female state in Romantic poetry.
Within this particular poetic world, a powerful female acting under her own volition, such
as Keats' Belle Dame or Coleridge's serpentine Geraldine, appears as a treacherous
phantom: she "effeminizes" men by seducing them into unconsciousness and
tractability. Moore adopts the Romantic poet's obsession with consciousness and
unconsciousness, willfulness and will-lessness, only to redistribute these traits
unconventionally among Man, Woman, Nature, and Poet--and the specific strategy of her poem
is radical ambiguity.

Consider, for example, the intricacy of Moore's design on the initial monosyllable:

Man looking into the sea,
taking the view from those who have as much right to it as you
have to it yourself,
it is human nature to stand in the middle of a thing.

The word "Man" here refers in part to a particular man on a particular day,
as Moore's own commentary on this poem makes clear:

As for "A Grave," it has a significance apart from the literal origin, which
was a man who placed himself between my mother and me, and the surf we were watching from
the middle ledge of rocks on Monhegan Island after the storm. ("Don't be
annoyed," my mother said. "It is human nature to stand in the middle of a
thing." (Costello 1981, 62)

"Man" also contributes to our sense of "a significance apart from the
literal origin" by standing for mankind or humankind--a meaning that Mrs. Moore's
quoted remark about "human nature" bolsters. But "Man" of course also
denotes gender, the opposite of Woman--and this third sense is reinforced by the sexual
suggestion of "stand in the middle of a thing," by our knowledge of the
occurrence prompting the poem (a man blocking the view of two women), and by our awareness
of the poem's complex history of revision. In the two extant early drafts, the noun
"people" appears mid-poem:

... people now at their best, whose clothes
are a
Testimony to the fact, row across them [across the bodies of dead
People],
the blades of the oars moving to-
Gether like the feet of water spiders as if there were no such
thing
as death:

But in the Dial revision and the final version, the operative term has changed:

men lower nets, unconscious of the fact that they are desecrating a
grave,
and row quickly away--the blades of the oars
moving together like the feet of water spiders as if there were
no such thing as death. [my emphasis]

The action of the completed poem, then, takes us from "Man," who annoyingly
asserts his volition, to "men" who act obliviously or unconsciously, and finally
to the bodies of the drowned, whom we are encouraged by Moore's deployment of nouns to see
as drowned men, possessed of neither "volition nor consciousness." Moore thus
reverses a convention of Romantic poetry by relegating Man (who becomes merely one of the
"dropped things" in her ocean) to the characteristically feminine role of
objectified and disempowered "other." If her artfully ambiguous poem may be read
as a Modernist memento mori addressed to humankind, it may also be read as a woman
writer's canny rejoinder to the male-dominated tradition--her revision of the male poet's
gendered agenda. Moore's stately and mysterious sea has a strong retributive undertow.

Moore effects her revisionary reversal by exploiting another Romantic trope, the Belle
Dame Sans Merci. In Keats' ballad of that name the knight, having been seduced by a
mysterious lady, wakes from a ghastly dream drained of vitality "On the cold hill
side." The strange lady with "wild wild eyes" whom the knight has met
"in the meads" is--like the powerfully perverse Geraldine "with serpent's
eyes" who springs from an old oak tree in Coleridge's "Christabel," or like
The Nightmare LIFE-IN-DEATH in his "Rime of the Ancient Mariner"--a phantom
woman associated with destructive rather than nurturing Nature. As figures of unchecked
female volition, Keats' Belle Dame and her Coleridgean counterparts are wily, ghostly,
weirdly beautiful, and treacherous. In "A Grave," Moore encourages us to see the
sea as another such fatal femme. Possessed of a similarly sinister ocular
intensity, the sea is "quick to return a rapacious look"; endowed with a
similarly ensnaring allure, she is "beautiful under networks of foam."

But while the Romantic poet's Belle Dame Sans Merci is always nefarius and inimical,
Moore's re-figuring of this figure remains equivocal. Her ocean/grave represents death,
humanity's common enemy, and yet her sea as re-former of inherited poetic patterns acts
too as Nature's and Woman's ally. The heavy sibilance throughout Moore's poem (in all
versions) reminds us of Satan, of the serpentine and treacherous ladies of Romantic
poetry, of the actual foaming ocean that advances and retreats over the shingle of land,
and of mortality which menaces and circumscribes our lives. But with her insistent
sound-play--e.g., "you cannot stand in the middle of this"; "repression. .
. is not the most obvious characteristic of the sea"; "their bones have not
lasted"--Moore also hisses back at Man, and at the arrogant male poet in particular,
who arrogates to himself dominion, who is always trying "to stand in the middle of a
thing." By choosing to conclude her poem with the word "consciousness,"
Moore reserves that climactic position for the quality of attentiveness to self and to
"other" which is her highest aesthetic and moral value, while giving her sea (as
retributive force) the last word, the last hiss." How like Ezra Pound, that brilliant
celebrant of male will, not to have acknowledged the significance of her word order
(although the early stanzaic version that he received underlines its structural
importance); how like him to have proposed that she conclude instead with
"volition."

If Moore exploits the traditional association of Woman and Nature, she also calls that
time-honored trope--together with other literary complacencies--into question. Her sea,
whose "wrinkles progress among themselves in a phalanx--/beautiful under networks of
foam," partakes of masculine militarism as well as feminine seduction. With these
quick contradictory comparisons, Moore unsettles our assumptions about the nature of
Nature, while she deviously turns the Romantic poet's favorite tool against him. Asserting
his Imagination through metaphor, the Romantic poet (ranging over mountains, lakes,
antique lands) in a sense colonizes the world--appropriating "otherness" and
subduing it to his own purposes. By metaphorically equipping her ocean (as armed Roman
legion, as negligeed temptress) and pitting it against Man, Moore turns the tables on the
presumptuous male poet--subjecting him to his own "subject," and so subtly
mocking his delusion of dominion, of imaginative sway.

In her own use of metaphor, Moore eschews poetic imperialism. At times, as we have just
seen, she employs metaphor to expose the pathetic fallaciousness of the Romantic poet's
pretension. At other times, she offers an alternative form of analogizing:

The firs stand in procession, each with an emerald turkey foot
at the top ...

the birds swim through the air at top speed, emitting catcalls as
heretofore-

In these lines, Moore juxtaposes rather conventional anthropomorphic associations (firs
in procession, birds emitting catcalls) with associations of a different order. With her
startling, stacked-up comparisons of natural creatures or objects to other natural
creatures or objects (firs/emeralds/turkey feet; birds/fish/cats), Moore lets the fresh
air of irrepressible "otherness" into her poem--evoking what Bonnie Costello has
termed "the splendid independence of nature from our conceptual purposes" (1981,
64). Almost hallucinatory in their specificity, her fir trees (like some new brand of
Christmas tree with emerald turkey-foot stars) stand in strange self-sufficiency--emblems
of Nature crowned only by Nature.

Moore shares with the Romantic poet a passion for natural description, but her own
descriptive procedures upset inherited notions about the relation of the Poet to
Nature--making us question which is the collector (she calls the sea "a
collector") and which is the collected, which is central and which peripheral. Part
of her procedure is to dispose of conventional (post-centered) notions about dispositio,
about arrangement. The eccentric image of fir trees, for example, comes directly after
the first appearance of the word "grave," and darts peculiarly away from the
gravity of the meditative situation. After the second appearance of "grave"
halfway through the poem, we come across oared boats, figured as water spiders, that
"row quickly away"; and then, immediately following the single mention of
"death, we meet with Moore's elaborately metaphoric "wrinkles" or waves.
Collectively, these quick turns from frightening mass to fanciful minutiae--and from depth
back to surface--may be seen as evidence of Moore's psychological skittishness, of that
impulse to "row quickly away" from a disturbing and submerged subject which we
sense in other poems such as "Marriage" or "The Fish." But these
imagistic dartings or digressions also signal Moore's extreme self-consciousness about
poetic egocentricity. They show how the world resists any neat poetic plan, such as the
plan to portray the sea metaphorically as merely "a well-excavated grave"; and
they show Moore once again (to borrow Costello's phrase) "resisting the mind's
impulse to circumscribe experience" (1980, 28).

Although Moore cannot entirely resist that impulse (since every poem in some way draws
its circle around a bit of experience), it is crucial to her project that she acknowledge
the world's independence from the human compulsion to order--from poems, for instance, or
from prayers:

Let who will pray for fair weather to bring him home
Aristagoras who is buried here. The sea is the sea.

These lines, which Moore copied in her notebook from the Greek Anthology long
before she began work on "A Grave," remind us of that ocean which exists apart
from, but not merely peripheral to, human concerns. The poet cannot stand in the middle of
it, or circumscribe it (write his--or her--way around it): "The sea is the sea."

This much re-vised early poem of Moore's feels different from later ambitious poems
(e.g., "Marriage," "An Octopus," "The Jerboa," "The
Pangolin") partly because it feels more traditional: in its medium length, in the
stateliness of its rhythm and the comparative ease of its syntactic unfolding; in the
relative steadiness of its meditative gaze. It lacks the satiric bite of early short
pieces, such as "To a Steam Roller" and "Pedantic Literalist," the
capaciousness and more radical experimentalism of a verbal collage like
"Marriage." But it does convey, in spite of its elaborate ambiguities, an
immediate sense of emotional force and rhetorical cohesion, of-a-pieceness--which may be
why Moore's younger friend, Elizabeth Bishop (who found her own ways to extend as well as
subvert the Romantic tradition) chose this poem to read as part of her 1977 talk for The
Academy of American Poets on Influences.

"A Grave" offered Bishop, as it offers us, an example of how a woman
well-versed in the literary tradition, rather than capitulating to the convention of
female silence, can wield that tradition and write her own eloquent verses. Adapting the
Romantic poet's own tactics and tropes, Marianne Moore found a way to chasten his
imaginative egocentricity, replacing his "I-ness" with her less appropriative,
minutely observant eye. And she did this even as she extended early Modernist Imagism with
moral and meditative substance. The history of her work on this pivotal poem shows her to
be both a reactionary writer (re-activating inherited literary configurations) and a
revolutionary one (turning and twisting the male-dominated tradition, just as her ocean
causes "dropped things" to "turn and twist"). A grave is a place where
dead things are put to rest, but Moore's "A Grave" is a locus of vital and
challenging re-vision.